Beautiful Pictures, Poor battery life

I bought this camera three years ago and have bought countless rechargeable batteries and chargers since. Even the most expense high capacity batteries and expensive chargers will give this camera good battery life. I have managed to make it slightly usable, but I still carry around five sets of spare batteries and am constantly swapping them out. That said on 2500mAh NiMH batteries I can get about 20 or 30 pictures which is usually about how many I take anyway. I have used this camera for a digital photography class with excellent results. I was intimidated at first when most other students had very expensive cameras, but in the end the picture quality of my pictures was as good as if not better than most of theirs. I was extremely pleased with the picture quality. If you take a little time to learn the camera and use the right settings you can take great pictures every time (except when the batteries run out)